“We were getting married already,” said Clara, shaking off Jess’s sarcasm. “But the dress was like an affirmation, and there were all these other things. We both have two older sisters; our mothers have the same birthday.”
“And have you met her?” said Jess. “His mother?” It had only been eleven months.
“She’s dead.” Clara flopped down on her bed, her patience waning. “You don’t get it; I know you don’t.” She kicked an oversized pillow onto the floor. “You only just met him, and you’re all caught up in your own thing.”
“My ownthing.” Jess heard the dismissal.
“Your life,” Clara acknowledged. “But you must have had your own signs, affirmations, that Adam was the one for you. Did the sun shine on your wedding day?”
Jess said, “Yes.”
“Well, there you go,” said Clara. “And wasn’t there something to that?”
“It was the middle of a heat wave,” Jess told her. “The driest May on record. It hadn’t rained all spring. There were wildfires.” She was still holding the dress, thumbing the flowers on the fabric. She let go and wandered over to the rocking chair that had been in Clara’s dorm room when they first became friends. A photograph of mummified remains was thumb-tacked to a bulletin board that hung over a desk. The window looked out onto the sunset, or what was left of it, and the light was reflected in the windows above the garage. For a moment Jess thought she heard the baby crying, but when she listened there was no sound at all.
“You being here—it means everything,” Clara said, sitting up. Jess turned around to face her. “All of this, the wedding and the family—you’re the part that really matters.” This was the assurance Jess hadn’t even known she was waiting for, and she felt awkward now receiving it, for even needing it, although it also made her feel like someone she recognized for the first time in recent memory. She sat on the bed beside Clara, who wasn’t finished. “More than anything, I was coming home toyou. To have you get to know Nick. And I want to know Bella, and Adam. I’ve met so many people, but it was never the same.”
“I know,” said Jess, and there was such relief in this, in their mutual understanding, and in being able to affirm,Yes, this is it exactly. It was the reason Jess was here, with her husband and their tiny baby, even though the journey had been so hard. Because there were friends and there werefriends, and in her day-to-day life she too kept waiting for the former to turn into the latter. Clara had set a bar that was high.
“And I’ve been drifting,” Clara admitted. “I know that. For so long, it was what I had to do. After my dad, and everything—and it only got more complicated. I couldn’t do it the way you did, one thing just leading to another.”
“Oh, I’ve been drifting too,” said Jess. Since the baby arrived, she’d never felt so unmoored.
“It’s different, though,” Clara said. “Because you’ve got this baby now, a tiny perfect thing whoneedsyou.”
And Jess wanted to tell Clara about the endless nights and that endless need, how the last thing she’d been expecting was for motherhood to knock her over like a wave that just kept coming and coming. How it wasn’t different at all. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “Sometimes it’s like I’m lost in outer space.”
“But you’re not,” Clara said. “I mean, you’ve got all the pieces and you’re actually building something tangible, a family. Alife.”
“It’s not so simple,” Jess said. She wanted to say,I’m not so simple. “And all those pieces have to come from somewhere.” It wasn’t easy for anyone. Did Clara think she’d just stumbled upon the pieces, like magic?
“I just never seem to know where to find them,” said Clara. “How to do all those normal things.” She paused. “The way other people settle—I don’t know how to do that.” Jess raised an eyebrow. After all these years, she still didn’t know whether these comments were deliberately cutting or if Clara was just obtuse. “I don’t mean it that way,” Clara said, aware enough to know something had stung. “It just felt like as long as the scenery was changing I didn’t have to think.” She looked at Jess. “I envy you, the way you always seemed to know where you were going, while I was spinning in circles.”
She really didn’t get it, Jess thought, amazed, dismayed. Although before Bella, Jess had thought having a baby would be not so different from carrying around a clutch purse, so maybe this shouldn’t be surprising.
She asked Clara, “What happened? The spinning circles.” She’d read Clara’s letters, trying to put the pieces together and figure out what lay between the lines.
Clara put her head on Jess’s shoulder and sighed. “It was all too much,” she said. “I don’t even want to remember, but what matters is that I got through it. And I’ll take responsibility. I wasn’t being careful, I got pregnant, and you can have one abortion, and you can even have two, but three just seems awfully irresponsible.”
“But your situation,” said Jess. “You were on malaria drugs. What else were you supposed to do?”
Clara moved around Jess to stretch out lengthwise on the bed, and Jess lay down beside her. Clara said, “I couldn’t have had an abortion even if I’d wanted one. We were out there in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t have the money to fly home. And then I lost it, the baby. It was honestly brutal, and I kept thinking of my dad. He used to have a ‘Life Begins at Conception’ sign hanging in the back of his pick-up.”
“Those notions of divine justice,” said Jess. “They’re hard to shake, you know, even for those of us who weren’t brought up fundamentalist.”
Clara said, “Really?”
“I never even think about it much, what happened to me. My abortion.” It had taken years, but Jess had finally learned to say the word, although she would always have to lower her voice in order to do so. “But when Adam and I decided to get pregnant, there was a part of me that was so scared I wouldn’t be able to get away with it, that surely there’d be a price to pay.”
“Because we’re just steeped in it, in our culture,” said Clara. “There’s the stigma and shame.”
“There’s an abortion in ‘Rapunzel,’ ” said Jess, unearthing this detail from the scholarly part of her mind that had lain dormant since her baby arrived.
“The Grimms took it out of their version,” she continued. “Which is crazy when you think about all the things they didn’t censor—those stories are brutal. But in the early versions of ‘Rapunzel,’ the ones in French and Italian, it wasparsleythe woman was craving at the beginning of her pregnancy, and parsley is one of the herbs that people have always used to induce abortions. Like, nothing about this is out of the ordinary. When I told my OB-GYN about mine—I had to, it’s part of my medical record for the rest of my life—he didn’t even flinch. And if I hadn’t had an abortion, Bella wouldn’t even be here.”
“I think the children you have,” said Clara, “make the idea of any other world impossible. And honestly, the miscarriage was such a turning point. Everything was such a mess, and I finally asked myself, ‘What are you doing with yourlife?’ I didn’t even want a baby, not then, and the guy was all wrong—it would have been terrible.”
“Who was he?” This was the longest uninterrupted conversation Jess had had with anyone since Arabella was born.
